In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst founded in Manchester the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), a women-only grouping that was to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. For the next 11 years, the suffragettes of the WSPU, led by the charismatic Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's chief organiser and key strategist, were to engage in brave, eye-catching and sometimes notorious deeds that grabbed the newspaper headlines. Both the Observer and especially the Guardian gave extensive coverage to the women's cause.

Throughout these years, the Guardian was strongly Liberal and edited by CP Scott, an influential member of the Liberal party who firmly supported women's enfranchisement.

At first the WSPU engaged in peaceful campaigning, just as suffragists had done for more than 40 years, without any successful result. However, the astute Christabel realised that more assertive tactics were necessary if votes for women were to be pushed on to the political agenda.

In 1905, she and Annie Kenny interrupted a Liberal party meeting by shouting out: 'Will the Liberal government give women the vote?" Both were roughly ejected from the hall and, rather than pay a fine, chose imprisonment.

The incident caught the attention of politicians and the press, which unanimously condemned their unladylike conduct, the Guardian suggesting that it was "such as one was accustomed to attribute to women from the slums".

This early reporting of the suffragette movement by the Guardian, edited through a male Liberal view that thought women could earn their enfranchisement if they engaged in reasoned debate and behaved in a ladylike manner, set the tone for much that was to follow.

The militant tactics of the suffragettes were regularly reported, sometimes in neutral ways, but often with condemnatory comments.

Liberals liked the suffragists of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which admitted men as members too and was led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who engaged in quiet, constitutional campaigning. The noisy, assertive suffragettes transgressed the gender expectations of Edwardian society.

In 1906, the WSPU headquarters moved to London and for the next few years the suffragettes engaged in various forms of civil disobedience, including heckling government ministers and deputations to parliament. Often they were violently manhandled by the police and roughs in the crowds. Hauled before the courts for disorderly conduct, they chose prison.

When Herbert Asquith, a staunch anti-suffragist, became prime minister in 1908 and repeatedly refused to grant facilities for a women's suffrage measure, these early forms of militancy were extended to more disruptive methods.

The reporting of these events by the Guardian and the Observer were always gendered and always tempered by the belief that suffragette tactics were wrong headed. In December 1908, when suffragettes broke up a Women's Liberal Federation meeting at the Albert Hall in London, where Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer, was speaking, the Observer commented that the shrieking women had turned the event into "a Bedlam ... all sense of decency lost ... it was a melancholy and disheartening spectacle; and the pity of it was that they were very often women who in saner moments would be treated with tender respect as gentle ladies".

The idea that the suffragettes were irrational, even mad, women features less strongly in the Guardian. Indeed, at times it seems that CP Scott is torn between his progressive Liberal views and condemnation of suffragette militancy.

In 1909, he condemned as "torture" the forcible feeding of hunger striking suffragettes who were protesting against the government's refusal to grant them political prisoner status. "We are "strongly of opinion," wrote Scott, "that so extreme a measure ... should not have been resorted to."

Nonetheless, he also condemned the violence that suffragettes had recently engaged in, namely throwing slates from roofs down on to Asquith's car when he was speaking in Birmingham. But no mention was made of the fact that the two women engaging in this activity took care not to hit Asquith or his chauffeur, nor that legitimate protest at Liberal party meetings had now been cut off since women were banned from attending such gatherings, unless they had a ticket.

Scott made sure that many letters supportive of forcible feeding were published, as well as those that were critical, and frequently attached a paragraph, in parenthesis, at the end of any one letter with which he particular disagreed.

On "Black Friday", as the suffragette deputation of November 18 1910 became known, when the suffragettes trying to reach parliament were treated particularly violently by roughs in the crowd and police who had orders to push them back, he also again, chivalrously, argued that the protesters "are citizens like the rest of us, and they have right to fair treatment and to the protection of the law".

But his patience ran out when, from 1912, the WSPU began to attack property in a more organised way, vandalising pillar boxes, setting fire to empty buildings and smashing shop windows in London's west end.

The change in WSPU tactics was a response not only to the Liberal government's provocation on the women's suffrage issue, but also to the fact that it was preferable to engage in some actionable offence, such as window-smashing, which would provoke immediate arrest than risk the violent manhandling that accompanied peaceful protests.

The death of Emily Wilding Davison, in June 1913, after she ran on to the racecourse at the Derby and attempted to grab the reins of the King's horse, was sympathetically covered in the Guardian. But Scott, upholding that women should seek "honourably and sanely the enfranchisement which is their right", commented on the "futility" of her act, claiming that the "horrible responsibility" for it lay upon the shoulders of the leaders of the militant movement. On June 11, the Guardian published an angry reply from the suffragette Evelyn Sharp.

"There is not a Cabinet Minister who is not responsible. There is scarcely a newspaper that is not responsible. It is an insult, after the shameful record of the last half-century, and particularly of the last seven years, to expect women to go on 'seeking honourably and sanely the enfranchisement which is their right', when by honour and sanity you only mean submission and patience ... If men, after being tricked and set aside as women have been for fifty years, were to continue meekly to 'seek what is their right', you would say they were not worthy of the freedom they sought."

In August 1914, when the first world war broke out, Emmeline Pankhurst called an end to all militancy. In February 1918, when certain categories of women over the age of 30 were granted the vote, the Guardian and Observer attributed this to the statesmanship of Millicent Fawcett rather than the impassioned leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. The debate has divided historians ever since, many of whom still view the movement through a masculinist perspective that was so evident in the newspaper reporting of the day.

· June Purvis is professor of women's and gender history at the University of Portsmouth

· This article was amended on Friday November 16 2007. The picture attached to the article above was originally captioned as being of Emmeline Pankhurst, in fact it was Christabel Pankhurst. This has been changed.